Trump Election Commission, Already Under Fire, Holds First Meeting – New York Times

In remarks to his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, Mr. Trump pledged that its work would be open to inspection and would âfairly and objectively follow the facts wherever they may lead.â But he soon swung to an attack on officials who had refused to cooperate with the investigation, twice saying that voter data from their states would be âforthcomingâ and raising doubts about their motives.

Democrats, including the former secretary of state in Missouri, Jason Kander, said at a news conference on Wednesday that the panelâs inquiry was a charade.

âThis is not really a policy difference between the two partiesâ over the danger of fraud, he said, but âa political strategy for them thatâs no different from where they run their TV ads, or where they send mailers, or whose doors they knock on. Thatâs what voter suppression is about for them.â

Academic studies and other investigations have repeatedly concluded that election fraud is minuscule, and that misrepresentation at the ballot box, the kind of fraud most often cited as a problem, is almost nonexistent.

The panel has met fierce resistance from voting-rights advocates since Mr. Trump created it in May. Many state election officials joined the outcry this summer after being asked to provide data on all 200 million registered voters to the panel for analysis.

Led by Mr. Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, and the panelâs titular chairman, Vice President Mike Pence, some members of the commission called for a bipartisan effort to assess the scope of any fraud problem and to focus on the panelâs other charge, battling public loss of confidence in election results. But they also said the voting system had problems and vulnerabilities that might be addressed by closer scrutiny of those who register and cast ballots.

Mr. Kobach told the group that he had uncovered 128 cases of noncitizens who registered or tried to register in Kansas elections, but that the true number had been estimated to be as great as 18,000.

With access to data nationwide, he said, âthis commission will have the ability to find answers to questions that have never been fully answered beforeâ about the extent of illegal voting.

The panelâs critics noted that Mr. Kobachâs own far-reaching antifraud campaign had secured but one conviction of a voting noncitizen since 2011, and nine fraud convictions in all, in a state with 1.8 million registered voters.

Photo

Voting at an elementary school in Raleigh, N.C., on Nov. 8. President Trump has claimed that illegally cast ballots robbed him of a popular vote victory in the 2016 election.Credit
Jeremy M. Lange for The New York Times

The Trump commission is the fourth blue-ribbon inquiry in the last 17 years into what went wrong in a general election and how to remedy those problems. But beyond that, it bears no resemblance to its predecessors.

The commission began public life saddled with at least seven lawsuits challenging its conduct, its transparency and even its reason for being. Two more complaints have been filed with federal agencies against two of its 12 members.

A broad range of experts and ordinary citizens already has written off its legitimacy, noting that it is led by and filled with some of the nationâs most zealous proponents of the notion that fraud is a huge threat to democracy and requires new restrictions making it harder to register and vote. Democrats say the real purpose is to keep minorities and other Democratic-leaning constituencies from voting.

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Some commissioners say the criticism of the commission has been unfair. They say that they have open minds or that they will not sign on to any conclusions that are predetermined.

âWe are disappointed with those who choose to condemn the commission even before it has met and certainly before its work product is known,â the president of one conservative advocacy group active on election issues, Harvey Tettlebaum of the Lawyers Democracy Fund, said in an email this week. And conservatives say there is now so much concern about the integrity of elections that the public demands more safeguards against fraud.

But opponents say the commission already has overstepped so many bounds, from its membership to procedural requirements like posting public documents and holding open meetings, that it now has to earn peopleâs trust.

The panel has been plagued from the start by missteps. An early telephone conference led to complaints that the panelists had violated federal open-meeting requirements. Wednesdayâs meeting in a secure federal building in Washington was made available to the public only via internet video, ending a tradition of fully open sessions. The research staff appears to have bypassed the network of election experts that aided past inquiries.

Election officials nationwide bristled last month when Mr. Kobach asked them to assist his hunt for fraud by providing public data on all 200 million registered voters, including partial Social Security numbers, addresses, military statuses, political party registrations and felony records.

Some experts argued that matching data cobbled from statesâ incompatible databases could be hugely expensive and was unlikely to produce any accurate results. Others were puzzled that some of the data was being collected at all.

âIf youâre going to be accused of partisanship and voter suppression,â said Nathaniel Persily, an elections expert at Stanford Law School, âone thing you might want to do is not ask the states which voters are Democrats and which ones are Republicans.â

Privacy advocates argued that federal law expressly bars government agencies from collecting voter information (whether the commission legally is an agency is one issue in the battle). Critics warned that so much data, if leaked or otherwise released, could lead to identity theft. Citizens in some states hustled to remove their names from voter rolls before Washington received them â 3,938 in Colorado alone as of Friday.

Mr. Kobach later suggested that those registrants were noncitizens and other illegal voters hoping to escape detection by the commission.

Critics said their privacy fears were confirmed last week when the commission posted on its website 112 pages of emailed citizen comments, many virulently critical, complete with the authorsâ names, addresses and other identifying data.

The panel includes several leading proponents of a crackdown on voter fraud. One, J. Christian Adams, runs an Indiana-based advocacy group, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, that wages legal battles to purge voter rolls and has made claims of illegal voting by noncitizens in Virginia that election officials and others say are spurious. Another advocate listed as a director of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, Hans von Spakovsky, is a scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Accusations that the panel is stacked are at the center of an A.C.L.U. lawsuit filed last week that claims violations of the Federal Advisory Committee Act. Among other requirements, the law mandates that commissions like Mr. Trumpâs be âfairly balanced in terms of the points of view represented.â

âItâs hard to believe that a commission structured this way doesnât already know what it wants to do,â Justin Levitt, a voting rights official in the Obama administration Justice Department who is now a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said in an interview.